In recent years, personal fitness and general good health have been brought to the forefront of the public consciousness. As a result exercise facilities, such as gymnasiums, have seen an increase in demand for their services, putting greater pressures on them to provide the products which the public want. Each gymnasium has only a limited amount of floor space within which they can make various items of exercise equipment available for their members. As a result a high priority for the gymnasium owners is to ensure that they provide the right number of the right items of exercise equipment within the space they have available. Therefore it is desirable to provide a solution which enables gymnasium owners to maximise use of equipment and the floor space they have, and to increase customer satisfaction by providing the equipment which the users of gyms and other exercise facilities prefer.
Some methods of monitoring exercise equipment in other ways to those described below and for other purposes are known. These include providing feedback to the user on user performance (U.S. Pat. No. 6,059,692, Hickman), a monitoring and billing means (U.S. Pat. No. 6,656,091 B, Abelbeck et al.; US 2005240417, Savage) and a method of predicting when equipment maintenance will be required (WO 2006087738 A, Camax S. A.). These methods provide the facility owners with data, such as which item of exercise equipment is used by which customer, but does not give them accurate data on the proportion of time for which a machine is occupied and therefore not available for other customers, whether or not it is in use. If a machine is occupied but not in use, it is unavailable for other gymnasium members and this occupancy period should ideally be taken into account when determining the selection of items of exercise equipment provided within an exercise facility.
Additionally, the above mentioned methods do not provide data concerning usage at specific times of the day or details of the specific types of exercise equipment used. It would be advantageous to provide improved apparatus and methods for collecting usage data which is more useful to the proprietors of exercise facilities to make resource allocation decisions.
Some aspects of the current invention aim to overcome these problems by providing an exercise equipment monitoring method and apparatus to record data including the usage and occupancy time for each item of exercise equipment over a limited time period, reducing the cost and inconvenience of the total monitoring process.